1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a software program with various applications for mental health professionals, specifically applications related to conducting professional, ethical, legal, academic, and business tasks associated with mental health practice.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
Traditionally, professionals working in mental health related fields have had to put a lot of effort into keeping track of their day to day professional activities, competencies, memberships, and responsibilities. In regards to note-taking and insurance billing, professionals must keep past and current notes on their therapeutic sessions and often times a file of notes printed or written on paper. Professionals then must send their notes to insurance companies and HMOs for reimbursement and often use third-party billing agencies. The process of writing notes and getting reimbursement has been done electronically or by mail in the past. Also, in terms of keeping up and paying for memberships, accreditations, licensures, certifications, insurance boards, CEUs, and trainings, mental health professionals have either had to deal with many different organizations person to person, electronically, via mail, by telephone, or by any number of means. Advertising for various mental health related professional associations, memberships, organizations, products, CEUs, and opportunities also have come from a varying set of communication mediums.
In the past, when a professional wants to give a formal assessment and/or evaluation they had to contact a publisher to receive permission and copies of the assessment and/or evaluation in order to give it. Publishers also had to have a professional's credentials to determine if they were able to give either Level A, Level B, and/or Level C assessments and/or evaluations. Mental health professionals must have proper training and/or education in order to administer and interpret certain types of assessments and evaluations.
In the past, when mental health professionals have needed to access information about multicultural issues, diagnostic criteria, ethical data, legal data, job offerings, CEU opportunities, medications, psychopharmacology, social services, theoretical orientations, interventions, research, and any other sort of relevant mental health related data they had to go to a number of differing sources located in differing areas such as the internet, books, journals, consultants, bodies of knowledge, and so forth.
Professionals in the past also have had to purchase access to different journals and research-based publications through many different outlets and have them delivered by mail or other mediums. Advertising and targeting audiences by mental health-oriented organizations, institutions, and/or businesses has also occurred through a variety of mediums. Professional mental health practitioners also have had to maintain professional activities through a variety of mediums and volitions when it comes to dealing with mental health organizations, businesses, and/or institutions. Mental health professionals have had to conduct their own statistical analyses on their data in a myriad of ways from certain software packages to doing it by hand or having a statistician or accounting professional do it for them when it is needed.
Portability of some forms of professional mental health information has not existed up to this point. Tracking information such as supervision hours, credentials, licenses, accreditations, specializations, professional memberships, time and activities spent meeting the requirements of professional memberships, insurance board membership, Continuing Education Units, and other kinds of information has been tedious in the past due to no portability or uniformity in the tracking of and sending of this kind of information to third parties.
Finally, mental health professionals have paid for many things associated with their professional practice and have had to deal with paying for products and/or services in many manners and through many mediums. The computer software program in this patent disclosure provides a new way for mental health professionals to facilitate their professional duties, responsibilities, and/or work in a myriad of new ways that expedites the ability for mental health professionals to facilitate said duties, responsibilities and work in a more efficient, secure, and electronic manner.